Reliance on Obfuscation or Encryption of Security-Relevant Inputs without Integrity Checking

The product uses obfuscation or encryption of inputs that should not be mutable by an external actor, but the product does not use integrity checks to detect if those inputs have been modified.


Description

When an application relies on obfuscation or incorrectly applied / weak encryption to protect client-controllable tokens or parameters, that may have an effect on the user state, system state, or some decision made on the server. Without protecting the tokens/parameters for integrity, the application is vulnerable to an attack where an adversary traverses the space of possible values of the said token/parameter in order to attempt to gain an advantage. The goal of the attacker is to find another admissible value that will somehow elevate their privileges in the system, disclose information or change the behavior of the system in some way beneficial to the attacker. If the application does not protect these critical tokens/parameters for integrity, it will not be able to determine that these values have been tampered with. Measures that are used to protect data for confidentiality should not be relied upon to provide the integrity service.

See Also

Comprehensive Categorization: Insufficient Verification of Data Authenticity

Weaknesses in this category are related to insufficient verification of data authenticity.

Data Integrity Issues

Weaknesses in this category are related to a software system's data integrity components. Frequently these deal with the ability to ensure the integrity of data, such ...

Verify Message Integrity

Weaknesses in this category are related to the design and architecture of a system's data integrity components. Frequently these deal with ensuring integrity of data, ...

Comprehensive CWE Dictionary

This view (slice) covers all the elements in CWE.

Weaknesses Introduced During Implementation

This view (slice) lists weaknesses that can be introduced during implementation.

Weaknesses Introduced During Design

This view (slice) lists weaknesses that can be introduced during design.


Common Weakness Enumeration content on this website is copyright of The MITRE Corporation unless otherwise specified. Use of the Common Weakness Enumeration and the associated references on this website are subject to the Terms of Use as specified by The MITRE Corporation.